Executive Review alerts for budget overspend

[xavierlegarrec]

Introduction

In SuccessFactors Compensation module cumulative budget movements (from a spend perspective – not from an available budget perspective) are handled through a feature called Executive Review where high level planners can make recommendation adjustments on their scope of hundreds or thousands of employees all in one screen.

Even though the leading practice use of individual guidelines prevents extreme budget overspends there can be still major gaps in case the guideline brackets are generous, for example if the recommendation is 3% to 5% but the max on which the hard stop runs is 10%.

A legitimate question we often get from customers is how to make sure Executive Reviewers are alerted about budgets overspends since there is currently no feature to disallow a Save on overspend in Executive Review (it is only available in the worksheet experience which is only used by first and sometimes second level planners).

Even if there was an enhancement to allow this in the future in my opinion it would most likely be the addition of a “warning” feature with customizable popup message as organizations would still want C-Level executives to go over budget if needed.

Workaround available

One quick configuration allowing for a customized message to be displayed to Executive Reviewers consists in using custom validations at the employee level to trigger warning messages.

This workaround can only be leveraged if the compensation template uses a leading practice budget design (in my experience the vast majority of clients do) with a budget percentage assigned to each employee (based on customized attributes such as legal entity, division, country… ) and then multiplied by their annual salary to make up an individual budget envelope (which then gets summed up dynamically when filtering in Executive Review).

Mathematically the only way an executive reviewer can overspend on any given scope is if at least one employee has a merit increase greater than their calculated individual budget envelope.

Consequently the custom validation formula will compare the merit amount for each employee vs the calculated individual budget envelope and display a message on Save such as “This employee’s merit recommendation is greater than their allocated budget envelope. Please make sure you are not overspending on the global scope.”  

Configuration steps

1. Create new custom validation column (leave column name blank but keep column visible)
2. Formula row should have something like : If(merit > Individual_budget_enveloppe,"*","")
3. Custom validation formula row should have something like : If(merit > Individual_budget_enveloppe,"false","true")
4. Select Warning only
5. Add the message that should be displayed

Configuration screenshot: 

Warning message displayed to Executive Reviewers on Save:

All the best, 

Xavier

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